Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.
The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.
Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.
For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.
The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.
Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.
For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.
With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.
Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.
Here's another one: search for "spaghetti," and you'll get a lot of results about people seeking recipes. But narrow it down to the "lifestyles" category, and you'll see that most of the search results that Google Insights provides involve the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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